The present invention relates generally to frequency offset compensation, and more particularly to frequency offset compensation in an ultrawideband receiver.
Communication systems often pass information from a transmitter to a receiver in a manner that makes use of a periodic signal. The periodic signal in many cases is not commonly shared between the transmitter and the receiver, such as by being provided to the receiver by the transmitter. Instead the transmitter and the receiver each generate their own periodic signal at appropriate frequencies.
Generally the periodic signals are based on a relatively low frequency signal from a single oscillator, such as crystal oscillator, an LC tank oscillator, a ring oscillator or some other oscillator, and the relatively low frequency signal is multiplied to a frequency or frequencies of interest. Unfortunately, oscillator output very often include variations between oscillators due to manufacturing and temperature variations, such that the frequency of an output oscillation signal may vary slightly from oscillator to oscillator.
Differences between oscillation frequencies of transmitters and receivers generally appears as phase shift or clock skew at the receiver. This phase shift may result in the receiver being unable to correctly determine values for received data. For example, for signals which encode multiple bits per symbol period, both amplitude of the signal and phase of the signal are often used to determine the encoded bits. Phase shift in such a received signal may result in an improper decoding of the bits. Similarly, phase shift of received signals which are encoded and decoded in the frequency domain may also result in phase rotation of signals transformed to the frequency domain, again resulting in an improper decoding of bits.
In many cases, a receiver may receive transmissions from multiple transmitters, each of which include their own oscillator, and these oscillators may be operating at slightly different frequencies. The receiver, therefore, over time may receive transmissions from many transmitters, and all of the transmissions may be phase-shifted with respect to each other. Thus, a receiver may receive transmissions that are not only phase-shifted, but phase sifted in different amounts depending on the transmitter providing the transmissions.
In addition, some communication systems may use a very wide band of the frequency spectrum. Frequency offset may vary for different frequency subbands for such systems and within frequency subbands. Moreover, the transmitters may operate in a bursty fashion, for example providing data in relatively short bursts followed by potentially lengthy periods of inactivity, imposing tight timing requirements on accounting for frequency offset.